The Sun below, the Ground above

  Prologue 4

  Salentep was able to do some puny magic tricks: Like relocating a forest or replacing the mayor of a big city by an illusion without anyone noticing - absolutly not speaking from experience. While this would seem spectacular to most, Salentep knew without a shadow of a doubt: There was nothing as magical as being able to walk. It may be in slow motion, but moving normally was a thrilling feeling of which Salentep would never get enough.

  As for how this miracle bath worked:

  - The fajr'ep bath had calmed down the metal'ep poisoning - the metal'ep was no longer trying to convert Salentep's Essence in the metal'ep variant.

  - The current season, Pe'lbas, reinforced Salentep's Essence - Pe'elbas increases the integrity of sabl'ep, making it harder for a transmutation towards metal'ep to take place, well increasing the conversion speed from fajr'ep to sable'ep.

  While waiting for Morep, Salentep ran outside to check on the frukt'ep collection system - not that they needed to since their awareness was everywhere at the same time on the farm, but Salentep needed a reason to justify running around. As for how someone moving in slow motion could possibly run? Simply by increasing the airborne time in between steps with aer'ep bending, which definitely wasn't a waste of the noble art. Salentep would point out to anyone thinking otherwise that moving around was far superior to any puny magic trick, and if you could use bending for those, Salentep was justified to use it for running.

  Leaving the house, Salentep first greeted Matilep and Joshep before jogging to the "real center" of the farm. The building was actually about 20 im'ep further North from it.

  This free space was well used by a giant crude lign'ep bowl, filled with hundreds of frukt'eps - kivi'ep, pom'ep, pomel'ep, terpom'ep and citron'ep to name a few. This may sound like a lot, but there was more than enough space for thousands of frukt'eps. The food was delivered by flowing rivers of liquid aer'ep, spewing out of the dozen of pipes surrounding the bowl - Salentep kept it flowing with constant bending. After delivering their cargo, the liquid arches over the bowl, before vanishing in another lign'ep opening to begin a new cycle. In the meantime, lign'ep being heavier then aer'ep in their current states, any frukt'eps arriving fell down in the bowl. The natural external lign'ep state for most plants and Salenteps skin was rubber-like, preventing any kind of damage the fall could provoke.

  After running a circle around the bowl, Salentep just couldn't bring themselves to justify wasting their time here any longer, and instead went down the road spiraling outwards from the center. The road was designed like this to increase the travel time, the perfect excuse to run around, as well as to annoy visitors. Mostly to annoy visitors. Not that those people would ever realize that the reason for the stupidly long time it took to reach Salentep's farm, was the farmer in question. How could they? If all they ever saw was a perfectly straight road. Take Morep for example, they could shorten the journey from more than 4000 im'ep to 200 im'ep, by just cutting through the fields...

  Salentep realized that they overlooked something in their mental pondering: Morep had memor'ep, so of course they would just follow the path.

  So let's, instead, take any other Im'ep - the kind that would realize it was utterly stupid to walk in a spiral to reach the center of a circle, and instead of pointlessly wasting their time, would just take the obvious shortcut: going through the fields. But even one of those Im'eps wouldn't do that. More like: Wouldn't realize they could. Salentep's entire farm was under an permanent illusion with the following rules: Make the path look straight and make anyone leaving it walk in half circle without realizing it.

  Talking about passive spells, right now, Salentep had:

  - One of them keeping an eye on the frukt'eps growing on the farm, harvesting them with an aer'ep blade once mature enough, before dropping them in a pipe opening.

  - One keeping the "make the road straight" illusion up and running.

  - One to make the aer'ep rivers flow

  - One that slowly thickens the aer'ep dome covering the farm

  - One that combines the akv'ep, created during the previous process, with liquid aer'ep - producing gaz aer'ep. Without providing a new anchor for the akv'ep, it would just rush back to it's previous location and unmake any progress of the dome.

  - One that kept an eye on Morep, Salentep always had one for every visitor.

  - One that managed the invisible kontenad'ep chamber floating around Morep, yes, the one that passively increased your grade.

  - Finally the rest was going over Salentep's memories. The older they became, the more they forgot about their long live. Salentep had discovered that constantly repeating it all was an effective to mitigate the loses.

  An engineer from Pelombis had once tried to discover how Salentep could possible handle such a big farm alone, mostly hopping to find revolutionizing machines or engines. But no, it was just Salentep multi-tasking. If Salentep happened to ever leave their farm, almost all of the things listed above would simply stop functioning.